Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people

At a point, this just goes to the competitive nature of our society. From a moral standpoint, if who we are is a product of our environment and our genetics, then we ourselves aren't anything that isn't predefined. Someone who is lazy is a product of their genes and environment in the same way that someone with a disease is the product of their environment and genes. So, what makes asthma (which I have) something that I'm applauded for overcoming with medicine while obesity is something people are generally frowned upon for overcoming with medicine? Well, the fact that we want to ascribe the later as a choice - the choice to eat.<p>Einstein didn't believe in free will. However, he said that holding people responsible for their actions was a pragmatic approach for society to take (presumably because such action changes the environment that we are all in).<p>There are huge struggles because people don't want to accept that they have less free will than they ascribe. As such, the goal is to hold people responsible for faults that you don't have and find excuses that let you off the hook for any faults that you have. There are organizations that create campaigns to get society to accept their fault as something that should be compensated for. Short attention span? That's ok because it's medical. Stupid? Lazy? Those are things that are the fault of the individual.<p>It's really hard. If you can medicalize your faults, you get legal protection for them. If you can't medicalize them, you're personally responsible for keeping them in control. That creates a huge incentive for medicalization of everything in the human condition. And we're all worried about being left behind in this Red Queen's Race.

I find it disturbing that this is even controversial.<p>First, the notion that there is an optimal "healthy" state is make-believe. We all get old and die, so in a sense we are all terminally ill. We should have a right to improve our minds and bodies as long as there is room for improvement.<p>More to the point, brain types fall on a spectrum. ADHD is just one extreme. Equating "median" with "healthy" is a fallacy. Consider this: is synesthesia a disease? It can make life very hard, but it can also make patient extremely creative. Imagine a world where synesthesia is the normal condition -- non-synesthetes would be considered retards!<p>If there were a drug that could turn you into a synesthete, should the drug be illegal?<p>Second, we all already take a brain-boosting drug: caffeine, which is both undeniably effective, and has a wide spectrum of side effects. Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison, but they are prescription-only because they don't have a history of social acceptability. "Used historically" = "safe" is an even bigger fallacy.<p>Third, you can't prevent people from taking brain pills by not funding research (if the research doesn't happen in the U.S, it will happen in other countries.). All that this policy will achieve is encourage a black market and unsafe usage.<p>The whole thing reminds me strongly of that Kurt Vonnegut piece posted here yesterday: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642</a>.

There could be nasty side-effects twenty years down the road, so I'd rather abstain.<p>It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt.

"Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse."<p>Not impressed - they would rather everyone be equally "stupid" rather than some people be smarter than others? These drugs do not take away from anyone, they only add.

"But she said she was concerned that wider use of stimulants could lead more people to become addicted to them. That's what happened decades ago when they were widely prescribed for a variety of disorders, she said.<p>"Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away," she said."<p>So, substances with a known history of addictive behavior. This is what we call burying the lede (quote from page 3 of the article). As important as the other considerations are that were brought up, this seems to trump them.<p>Do we know how addictive? Addictive like caffeine, or crack, or somewhere in between?

Modafinil seems to be an interesting way to augment your mental ability - No short term effects, except for a slightly increased heart rate. [see link for experiences]<p><a href="http://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Modafinil.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Modafinil.shtml</a><p>The <i>long</i> term effects would be a concern of mine if I was going to take it though.

Are use of drugs like these prevalent in the startup world? I can imagine it has to be pretty tempting. Plus there's the added incentive that you already (should?) have pretty productive people and stacking another multiplier on top of their productivity would be hard to turn down.<p>Or is it the case that working in a startup is already motivating enough that there wouldn't really be much of an additional benefit?

Isn't this akin to advocating for the legalization of steroids only here were talking about a thinking muscle instead of a moving one?

I'd like to see an incident where caffeine has caused such severe cutaneous and dermatologic reactions as modafinil has. If such drugs were deregulated, we would certainly see the number of victims of these horrible reactions go up.